Frequently Asked Questions

Domains:

You are responsible for purchasing and maintaining ownership of your domain. To take a FareHarbor site live, we’ll either need the login for your domain registrar (which you can find by searching the domain at who.is — examples include GoDaddy, NameCheap, etc.) in order to change the nameservers, or we’ll need you to change the nameservers to point the domain to our host server.

Note: If you plan to change your own nameservers, we will need to closely coordinate the timing to ensure that everything is configured properly, and we may request a listing of your DNS records before you make the switch.

Website Hosting:

We host FareHarbor Sites with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is widely used by the internet’s biggest websites (like Lyft, Netflix, and Expedia) to offer secure, high-speed hosting. We offer this hosting service to our clients for free. Once your new site is live, you are free to download a backup of your old website files and cancel your old web host (just be sure you aren’t also cancelling email hosting if that’s something you’d like to keep with your previous host provider).

Email:

We do not offer email hosting ([email protected]). If you already have this set up through another host, we’ll be sure to properly configure the MX records on our end so that emails route correctly. If you are concerned and want to be sure, go ahead and send us over your MX records or email host login and we’ll cross-check everything. If you don’t currently have email hosting at your domain, we generally recommend Google’s GSuite tools, but we can configure your site for any email host of your choice as long as you provide the MX records.

When you go live on a FareHarbor Site, we simply point your domain to the new site on our server instead of to your old site’s host server. This means that your old site is not deleted or modified in any way. If you’d like to retain files or information from your old site, you can backup the files from the server where you were hosting it, and they will remain hosted on your old server until you cancel that host.

FareHarbor Sites are a partnership and when your company succeeds online so does FareHarbor. While our team will work to honor your requests where we are able, our goal is to build websites that will optimize online bookings. For this reason we may refuse any requests that may hurt online bookings or go against industry best practices.

Yes! Due to the way we maintain and secure our websites through our content delivery network, Cloudflare, we require that you point your nameservers to FareHarbor’s. We are unable to take your site live on your domain without updating the nameservers.

Note: If your domain is managed through a third party such as an IT department or web developer and you are unable to give FareHarbor access to your domain, you will need to confirm that changing the nameservers will not be a problem before we build your website.

Content & Brand Materials

You retain all copyright and ownership of the content and brand materials on the website we build for you. This includes—but isn’t limited to—your logo, photos, text, and any graphics you provide us.

FareHarbor Templates

Because our templates are developed in-house for the purpose of providing free, optimized websites to our FareHarbor clients, we retain ownership of the template itself. This means that if for any reason you leave FareHarbor, your content and brand materials can go with you, but not the templated site.

Custom Booking Flow:

One of the benefits of FareHarbor Sites is that we develop them specifically for conversion-friendly integration with the FareHarbor booking system. Between our account managers (our in-house conversion experts) and our web content specialists (experts at translating that conversion knowledge into optimized websites), we take a close look at your offerings and Dashboard setup in order to design a powerfully optimized booking flow.

Basic SEO Foundation:

We ensure that all our websites have a solid foundation for SEO based on data and research on current best practices. This includes:

• Title tags and meta descriptions
• Quality text
• Proper use of header tags
• Image alt text
• Proper use of keywords
• Navigation menu organization
• Permalink structure

Google Analytics Tracking
Each FareHarbor Site is set up with Google Analytics tracking. If you already have Google Analytics on your current website we’ll transfer this over to the new one for you.

Content Check:

Our copy team will review your existing content to ensure it communicates information clearly, provides a powerful user experience, and supports your SEO. While we can’t create content for you from scratch, we’ll check the content you provide for grammar and SEO best practices.

Website Access & Training:

We strongly believe in offering our clients access to their sites and empowering them to make edits themselves. Once your site is live, we’ll set you up with your own personal login for the site. We also offer training tutorial videos that walk you through the backend of your FareHarbor Site.

Custom Development:

In order to efficiently build and maintain websites free of charge for a large volume of clients, we utilize the power of a template. Our template is developed in-house specifically for our industry and is quite versatile in its application. We don’t offer custom development beyond the scope of the template.

Plugins:

Plugins can interact with a template system in a wide variety of ways, including causing bugs in the template code or a decrease in site speed and overall performance. For this reason, we do not allow third party plugins to be installed on our sites.

Customizable Blog:

Our main development focus is on booking optimization for tours and activities. As a result, we don’t currently offer custom blog designs beyond the default WordPress layout. However, we plan to update the blog design capabilities in the future. We work on new features on a regular basis, and we let you know when the latest updates to FareHarbor Sites come out!

Content Creation:

Your website is only as good as the content that lives on it. While we’re happy to help spruce up the content you provide, we don’t create content from scratch.

Ongoing SEO Management:

We lay a solid foundation for SEO on all our sites, but we don’t offer advanced SEO strategies or ongoing SEO maintenance. Services outside of our scope include link building, keyword research, content creation, and active analytics research. If you’re interested in taking a proactive step to help your SEO, we recommend starting a blog.

Marketing & Advertising:

We don’t offer any marketing or advertising services at this time. Services outside of our scope include social media management, inbound marketing, pay-per-click advertising, and other ad campaign creation/management. Learn how to get started on your own marketing campaigns on FareHarbor Compass.

Privacy Compliance Features:

FareHarbor Sites include basic cookie consent on your website. For clients who would like advanced cookie consent or data subject rights management products, we have partnered with OneTrust’s CookiePro platform, which offers the simplest and most cost-effective solution for GDPR/CCPA compliance. Use the code “FareHarbor” at checkout for one month free. If you want to learn more about this, we recommend you contact either OneTrust or your FareHarbor account manager.

No. The content (text, images, graphics) of your website belongs to you, and FareHarbor does not hold any rights over that. The site itself and the WordPress theme that it is built on are the property of FareHarbor and will not be transferred if you decide to end your relationship with FareHarbor.

Our project coordinators are our subject matter experts when it comes to FareHarbor Websites. It’s their job to collect all the necessary information for your website and ensure that the website process is smooth and timely.

Once you submit your submission form, you will be assigned a project coordinator. They will be your primary contact for anything concerning the website until it is live. Any questions regarding your Dashboard should still be directed to your account manager or our support team.

Once your website goes live, our support team or your account manager will assist with any ongoing website needs.

Our web content specialists are dedicated to building attractive, conversion-friendly websites for FareHarbor clients. We have a mutual interest in boosting your business through a strong online presence.

Our web content specialists have collectively spent hundreds of hours examining websites for tour and activity companies. They’ve seen the best — and the worst. They also draw from industry-specific research regarding best practices, user experience, and optimized booking flow.

Their skills encompass the intertwined tenets of writing, design, user experience, and web development. All our web content specialists are avid adventurers with a keen first-hand experience of how travelers and vacationers like to book their experiences. Mix that with acute technical know-how, and you’ve got an expert team crafting business-changing websites.

A domain name registrar is a company that manages the reservation of Internet domain names. It is typically the company you purchased your domain from. Some common registrars include GoDaddy, Namecheap, and 1 and 1. If you’re not sure where your domain is registered, start by checking the ICANN directory lookup tool.

DNS or Domain Name System is how your domain communicates with the different services that it utilizes, such as your website or your email. FareHarbor manages our websites’ DNS through our content delivery network, CloudFlare. Our team will query and copy any current DNS records on your domain prior to launching your website to ensure any current services you are currently utilizing continue to function after the website has launched.

FareHarbor is not an email provider and does not host email. If your email is currently attached to your domain you will need to continue paying your email host after you FareHarbor site goes live to ensure the email remains active. If you are interested in setting up an email address that incorporates your domain we recommend Google Workspace. 

As long as your hosting is not tied to your email, you can end your contract with your current hosting provider. If your hosting is tied to your email, you will need to continue paying for hosting or migrate your email to another platform.

FareHarbor will take over as your website hosting provider and be available to help maintain your website.

We don’t know the intricacies of what services the third party offers you, so be sure to get clarity on this before you end your contract with them. 

Images, videos, call-out banners, header/full row images: 1600 x 900 pixels (or bigger), landscape or panorama orientation

Other images: 1000 x 800 pixels minimum recommended

The larger and higher quality the image, the better it will look on the site. We can always decrease the size of an image, but making it larger or stretching it to fit a full-width section will distort the image and cause it to become blurry.

Full-width video rows and video blocks must be hosted on YouTube or Vimeo. If you do not have a YouTube account, we can upload the video to our FareHarbor YouTube account. We are unable to use Facebook videos. See a video example here.

We can use any photos defined under a creative commons license. Creative commons photos are great for general subjects such as “sunset” or “boat,” but they’re typically not available for specific subjects such as “sunset over Coco Beach” or “Sundance 320 boat.” If you require photos of specific subjects, you will need to supply those.

Yes, call-out banners are limited to 100 characters and can link to another page or section.

These are adjustable for each page. Our SEO and content team will update these according to their keyword research before the site goes live.

Yes, our WordPress theme has an Instagram feed option. We will just need your Instagram account login details to link that to the website.

No, FareHarbor Sites are not fully customizable. While our in-house WordPress theme is versatile and meant to optimize websites for online online booking conversions for tours, activities, and attractions, it does have certain limitations when it comes to layout and functionality. For this reason there may be certain requests that we are unable to fulfill. To get an idea of our theme’s capabilities, we recommend checking out our collection of demo sites.

No. Our WordPress theme does NOT use any third-party plugins or widgets from the general WordPress environment. This is to protect all FareHarbor Websites clients from insecure or outdated plugins that can affect overall site security or create glitches on your website. Our developers actively monitor and implement updates to our theme on a routine basis to keep our sites secure. Since we do not offer plugins, we can install certain scripts to your website’s code if you provide them.

No, we do not. Since we have an in-house team of SEO experts, we refer to their expertise for recommendations and changes to any FareHarbor Websites.

Animations are not currently available on our WordPress theme. This is to increase page speed/load times, as animations can slow down site performance.

Our WordPress theme has easy integration options for Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Facebook Pixel, AdRoll, Bing, Alexa, Pinterest, MixPanel, Optimizely, and more. We can also implement third-party marketing scripts into your website’s code for other methods of tracking site performance.

Yes! We have a functioning blog element that has basic customizations. Though our blog feature does allow some customization, it is not FareHarbor’s primary focus and therefore has its limitations. To see an example of a blog page, click here.

Blog Limitations:

• Set layout/view of blog posts on the main blog page
• Cannot add additional elements/features that are applicable for the rest of the website

We do not have built-in functionality for pop-ups because user experience and SEO best practices highly recommend not using pop-ups on websites, as they can affect bounce rates and increase user confusion during a session. But we can add a pop-up script from a third-party platform to your website if needed.

We ONLY use Google Fonts. These are the most accessible fonts for users around the globe on any browsing device, and they are the most secure fonts available. To browse all Google Fonts, click here. Our website theme can accommodate one heading font and one body font.

There is only one layout option for activity pages. You can see examples of this on our demo websites.

No. Currently, we do not have a built-in e-commerce feature. We recommend that clients who have e-commerce or online retail operations use an external link to a store/shop platform that exists outside the WordPress environment. Some common options for this are Shopify and Ecwid. We do not offer integration with WooCommerce or any other e-commerce plugin.

In some cases (if retail inventory is minimal), we can host your products on your FareHarbor Dashboard and sell products directly through FareHarbor. FareHarbor does not have the ability to track complex inventory like a traditional e-commerce platform, so this option only works for smaller retail shops.

No, you will not be able to access the WordPress source code or core theme files as our team maintains full control over this.

Yes! Once the website is living on your domain, we set you up with your own personal login and password with full administrative access to the backend of your website. You are able to log in and make changes or updates to your site at will.

Because your business is constantly evolving we understand that your website needs to be able to as well. Once your website is live our Live Sites Support team is available to help with basic requests and website maintenance. Our team is available to help during regular business hours. If you’d rather maintain the website yourself we will provide you and your team with full admin access to the WordPress dashboard and access to a number of resources for getting familiar with the WordPress theme.

If assigned one, your account manager will remain your primary contact. In certain cases, they can help answer questions regarding Google Analytics and assist with monitoring the performance of your website.

We don’t currently offer one-on-one training, but we do have a number of guides and videos to help you get started in working with the backend of the website. Browse our training videos. Please note you must be logged into FareHarbor to view these resources.

For new FareHarbor Sites, our SEO team performs keyword research, optimizes title tags and meta descriptions, and redirects your old website URLs.

For SEO reasons, we strongly suggest keeping your website on your current domain. Changing domains can severely impact your rankings, traffic to your website, and domain authority. Google will crawl the new domain and essentially view the website as a brand new operation, which will negate all your previous SEO rankings. The only time we take a website live on a different domain is when you have lost ownership of your current domain.

Due to the way search engines work, there’s always the possibility of a temporary dip in rankings while your site is re-crawled and indexed. However, these dips are not permanent and we do our best to minimize them. Learn more here.

While there are a number of factors that can affect the timeline, we generally aim to have sites built and live within a month of the initial submission.

While we can’t make any promises before having all the details, our team is happy to accommodate you, when we can. Please reach out to your project coordinator (or account manager if you have not been assigned one yet) to discuss this.

FareHarbor Sites currently supports the following languages:

• Chinese(Simplified)
• Chinese(Traditional)
• Danish
• Dutch
• English
• Finish
• French
• German
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Norwegian
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Spanish
• Swedish

FH Sites template supports 21 languages, and we are able to offer multi-language sites. Your site is always approved in English and in the business local language. However, it is also possible to add other languages once there is a demand.

To have a multi-language site is mandatory having the dashboard also translated.  The translations can be added to the site before or after going live. This will be agreed between the client and the project coordinator. All the translated content has to be provided by the client. FH does not offers content translation service.

It is FareHarbor’s business model to make every activity or item easily bookable online. While there are certain exceptions to this rule, we generally require your activities to be bookable online as a condition of FareHarbor hosting and managing your website.

FareHarbor does not write website content or blog posts for clients. However, our copywriters will check any content provided for grammar and best practices. If you want to begin writing a blog or creating your own content, we have a number of great resources on Compass.

FareHarbor does not create brand assets for clients. You will need to provide any graphics, logos, etc. for your website.